Daily variant creation limit reached when updating products

Conner
Shopify Partner
54 2 13

I received an error rejecting my Product/Variant updates due to a "Daily variant creation limit reached". I attempted to push up an update with 530 Products & 3800 Variants and they were all rejected. I have 11,200 Products & 52,000 Variants on this store currently.

I already throttle my API calls based on Shopify's leaky bucket system, but this appears to be a separate limit?

 

Here's the exact response below:

 

{
"product": [
"Daily variant creation limit reached. Please try again later. See https://help.shopify.com/en/api/getting-started/api-call-limit for more information about rate limits and how to avoid them."
]
}

I followed the link in the response and, as far as I can tell, it provides almost no details on this limit. I can't find any information about a daily limit.

Does anyone know where I can find more information about this? I'd love to know what the daily limit even is, as I can't even find that.

Thanks!

Replies 30 (30)

Josh
Shopify Staff
1134 84 233

Hey Conner, 

 

I'll respond to you here instead of the other thread where we had discussed this briefly. Currently, once a shop goes over 50,000 variants this variant creation limit will kick in - and then the limit is 1,000 new variants per day. This limit is subject to change at any time, but I have not heard of any plans to do so.

 

You're right though in that this should be more clearly documented, so I'll advocate for that internally here and try to get something posted for others in the future. 

Josh | Shopify 
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dmhliu
Visitor
1 0 2

the docs are not updated. Im also getting hit with this error, but im not sure if this logic is really working-- i certainly am not creating 1k variants /day and still get this error.  so i need more information to troubleshoot this issue. thanks

Conner
Shopify Partner
54 2 13

@dmhliu , are you updating 1000+ Variants per day? It may be possible that you're actually deleting/re-creating them.

fayalif
Visitor
1 0 0

Hi Josh,

 

What if i upgrade my shopify plan from Free to paid or this limit is for everyone?

Regards,

fayalif

Josh
Shopify Staff
1134 84 233

Hi @fayalif , 

 

This limit is for everybody, excluding shops on the Shopify Plus plan. 

Josh | Shopify 
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sydsfaisal
Shopify Partner
5 0 0

I am using Advanced Shopify plan still getting this error. I am trying to import the products from a csv file. And i am reciving the following error in my email..

62 Products failed to import.

Failed or ignored items won't affect the database. You can re-upload these after fixing the problem fields.

Failed:

palmartin
New Member
5 0 0

Shopify has a rate limit that takes effect when a store has 50.000 product variants. After this threshold is reached, no more than 1000 new variants can be created per day. We know from our own experience that it's a hassle to upload a new .csv file containing 1000 variants every single day.

Solution for non-Shopify-plus stores:

I would rather prefer Shopify to remove the 1000 variants per day limit but I am pretty sure they won't. We have made a small Shopify App to work this out.
The app is called Bulk Product Generator and can be found here: https://apps.shopify.com/bulk-product-generator
I
t's simple and straight forward. The app will generate up to 1000 variants every 24 hour. The variant created will have a Random Title and SKU like this:

TitleSKUProduct Type
new product 1new.product-H371dNEW PRODUCTS
new product 2new.product-cRGtwNEW PRODUCTS
new product 3new.product-4tt3sNEW PRODUCTS

 

Let's say you got Shopify store with 50.000 variants and need to add more products and variants to your store. Install this App and let it run for 10 days and you will have a total of 60.000 variants in your store. 50.000 from previous inventory plus additional 10.000 variants that you can edit using your favorite product editor tool. Personally we use Excel-Like Product managerhttps://apps.shopify.com/spreadsheet-bulk-product-manager
You can use Excelify or the built in .csv import function provided by Shopify: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/import-export/import-products

I keep Bulk Product Generator running 24/7 and each year I will have 365.000 variants available to edit.
Personally I always have 1 variant to each product so my configuration is 1000 products with 1 variant each. If you are selling clothes with XS,S,M,L,XL you can make the app create 200 products with 5 variants each.

Screenshot from the App:

f72f0f8b7ef669c81d83c628fea79eb4.png

RetailGroup
Tourist
4 0 5

What does it mean then that we can add Unlimited Products if we canNOT add an unlimited amount of products? That sentence does not even make sense when you say it out loud but that's what we have happening here. Why is there no asterisk or some explanation about this threshold because again, how can there be a daily threshold or any threshold when your plan allows you to add unlimited products? That makes no sense. So in essence, you really do NOT allow us to add an unlimited amount of products because when you hit 50K, you get halted every day. That's how the pricing page should read quite frankly. As a matter of fact, I found the blurb on the Importify web site. Not even yours. Its very odd that you hide that like you do. But I get it because why would anyone sign up that has a large scaled catalog? I get that's why but its very shady to act that way. I cannot believe a company with the money you have actually does this to people. Its so shady. Just be frank. Spell it out anywhere on your site. Let alone on your pricing page which is where it should be seen by everyone. But again, you offer unlimited products unless you have more than 50K, than you can only do 1K a day making it NOT unlimited. We are obviously limited by day if this were the case....

Gregarican
Shopify Partner
1033 86 285

@RetailGroup , not to be blunt, but if the shop has the product scale such as this in terms of unique SKU's, then logically upgrading to the Shopify Plus plan will remove the daily variant limitation. I know that these provisos might be buried in the online documentation. But when it comes to the practicality of solutions those are the two options --- work within the 1,000 daily variant constraints or upgrade to the Plus plan. 

DrGas
Tourist
7 0 9

Except item and variant count has nothing to do with store volume.

A card or video game shop, for instance, will have 10's of thousands of products/variants in the system, but will never have them all in stock at the same time. Heck, think about a shop that sells Pokemon cards. Easily over 10k unique cards, and each card can be in one of 5 different trading conditions. That's 50k variants, right there!

"work within the 1,000 daily variant constraints or upgrade to the Plus plan." - Sure. Cause jumping from a $30/mo plan to a $2k/mo plan is so simple! 

ChuckD87
Excursionist
16 0 4

If you delete products and variants to get back under 50,000 variants is the daily limit removed?

Matty_Foust
Tourist
3 0 2

Also curious about this last question. 

celeste16
Excursionist
14 0 6

Any luck on getting this answered???

tsimpson3
Visitor
1 0 1

This variant limitation is quite inhibiting when you are trying to load your store with clothing that cant have a 100 size/color variants.  Is there a way to petition for thisto be increased for apparel stores?

Mohcin
Visitor
2 0 0

Hello,

I am the same problem. Shopify is saying "You have reached the daily variant creation limit" and is not allowing to upload anymore product. What do I do???

Thanks!

Gregarican
Shopify Partner
1033 86 285

@Mohcin re-read what the Shopify rep replied. Unless the shop is on the Shopify Plus plan, these are the limits.

I'll respond to you here instead of the other thread where we had discussed this briefly. Currently, once a shop goes over 50,000 variants this variant creation limit will kick in - and then the limit is 1,000 new variants per day. This limit is subject to change at any time, but I have not heard of any plans to do so.

 

Mohcin
Visitor
2 0 0

Thank you for your reply! What is a Shopify Plus Plan? Where do I get it? How much does it cost?

Gregarican
Shopify Partner
1033 86 285
britishdsire
Visitor
3 0 0

IS there anyway i can increase limit of variants upload per day.

RennWerks
Tourist
3 0 2

We chose shopify because we read it supported unlimited products….our trial runs with 5,000 and 15,000 products went smooth and left us full of excitement. Then after trying to add our first 100,000 we got hit with errors. We have also hit this wall….. using the API also gives errors.

If shopify can increase this limit to 10,000 then i feel like we would all benefit. Until then……

If you have Big data… say over 20,000 products then it seems to make more sense to use a Big Commerce platform that supports unlimited products and changes.

This limit is such a problem that we are considering leaving shopify so we can properly build out our site with ALL our products.

maurinclan
Explorer
52 1 31

I am receiving this same error.  I offer lots, and lots of fabrics for my customers to choose from.  Each fabric has 33 variants.  I have hundreds of fabrics to upload before I open my store to the public.  At 1000 variants per day, I can only add 30 fabrics a day.  It will take me FOREVER to get my shop open.  I will need to find another platform for my business.  

RennWerks
Tourist
3 0 2

@maurinclan I would suggest looking into lowering the variants for each product. We did this by only having one(1) image per product to fill out our product listing. We also had to develop scripts to re-tag all products in a more effective way that allows us to categorize, filter, and provide a more robust search.

 

I am a bit curious to your situation with so many different fabrics.... Could it be possible to lower your variants by using metafields, and modifying the product page with a couple select options on 'add to cart'?

 

Any solution to solve this challenge will open up a can of additional challenges to overcome. For instance, lets say you were to lower variants based on images and types by combining the images into a single image, and then modifying the add to cart logic.. Then you would need to implement changes into the product html, each section/snippet of your theme, as well as develop a script to combine your images and map them matching the product details/selections. This would be very similar to css sprites on a larger scale. Most product images should be over 300px. So you could combine say, nine images at 400px each to a 1200x1200 size image. Then use CSS, and your logic to display the  nine (9) different images. 

 

This might be an actual decent solution for variants that are heavy based on images of products. Someone should develop a theme that has this logic built into it. 🙂

 

 

maurinclan
Explorer
52 1 31

I contacted shopify directly and got it worked out : ) I don't see a way that I can use less variants, without making it too confusing for my customers.  All my variants are actually different products, but I don't know how to do what you're saying, with the metafields.  If you have more info on that, I'd love to look into it.

RennWerks
Tourist
3 0 2

I did a google search and this might help explain the metafields... https://www.sunriseintegration.com/learn/how-do-i-use-the-new-shopify-metafields-day-1

 

I'm happy to see that you got your issue worked out... What solution did Shopify provide? It might be helpful for others to also know.

maurinclan
Explorer
52 1 31

They were really great about it; I explained my situation and they extended my unlimited variants for a month while I finish adding my products.  They said they would reevaluate at that time.  I think I will have the majority of my listings up by then and be able to stay under the daily limit after that.

Magdy_Dakak
Visitor
1 0 0

Hi, is there any e-mail address to contact Shopify directly? I have the same problem and I need to find a solution for it. Thanks.

Rob-Widdick
Shopify Expert
10 0 3

We're on Shopify+ and still get the error. I don't think it has much to do with creating variants either. 

palmartin
New Member
5 0 0

Shopify has a rate limit that takes effect when a store has 50.000 product variants. After this threshold is reached, no more than 1000 new variants can be created per day. We know from our own experience that it's a hassle to upload a new .csv file containing 1000 variants every single day.

Solution for non-Shopify-plus stores:

I would rather prefer Shopify to remove the 1000 variants per day limit but I am pretty sure they won't. We have made a small Shopify App to work this out.
The app is called Bulk Product Generator and can be found here: https://apps.shopify.com/bulk-product-generator
I
t's simple and straight forward. The app will generate up to 1000 variants every 24 hour. The variant created will have a Random Title and SKU like this:

TitleSKUProduct Type
new product 1new.product-H371dNEW PRODUCTS
new product 2new.product-cRGtwNEW PRODUCTS
new product 3new.product-4tt3sNEW PRODUCTS

 

Let's say you got Shopify store with 50.000 variants and need to add more products and variants to your store. Install this App and let it run for 10 days and you will have a total of 60.000 variants in your store. 50.000 from previous inventory plus additional 10.000 variants that you can edit using your favorite product editor tool. Personally we use Excel-Like Product managerhttps://apps.shopify.com/spreadsheet-bulk-product-manager
You can use Excelify or the built in .csv import function provided by Shopify: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/import-export/import-products

I keep Bulk Product Generator running 24/7 and each year I will have 365.000 variants available to edit.
Personally I always have 1 variant to each product so my configuration is 1000 products with 1 variant each. If you are selling clothes with XS,S,M,L,XL you can make the app create 200 products with 5 variants each.

Screenshot from the App:

f72f0f8b7ef669c81d83c628fea79eb4.png

PaulNewton
Shopify Partner
6274 573 1319

@RetailGroup  What does it mean then that we can add Unlimited Products if we canNOT add an unlimited amount of products? That sentence does not even make sense when you say it out loud but that's what we have happening here.

There should be asterisks in the marketing of "unlimited"* products. Per @palmartin's post,  a note about 365k variants, that is effectively a limit of 50k +  additional 315k/year.

*"unlimited" in marketing materials now means "unlimited with enough time" as in : sure you can eventually get all your unlimited products added as long as you have  an unlimited supply of years to make that happen adding 1k each day /mustache-twirl Nyehhehhehheh!  

 

@Josh Limitations are healthiest when clearly told upfront to involved parties, https://www.shopify.com/pricing is not doing that.

 

@palmartin Have you found the 1K limit is only for creation and never applies to updating?

So it may be feasible choice in some cases to premake placeholder variants that can then later be updated en masse to the real variant data. Meaning it's possible for stores to pre-emptively start maximizing that 365k/year products in advance before they may even know they need to bypass that limit.

 

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PaulNewton
Shopify Partner
6274 573 1319

Reference for future readers

 

Docs help.shopify.com adding variants -

Stores with 50,000 or more variants are subject to a daily rate limit for uploading variants by usin...

 

 

Save time & money ,Ask Questions The Smart Way


Confused? Busy? Get the solution you need paull.newton+shopifyforum@gmail.com


Problem Solved? ✔Accept and Like solutions to help future merchants

Answers powered by coffee Buy Paul a Coffee for more answers or donate to eff.org